Jan Jachimowicz

What would it actually look like to then act on that information?

And what sort of feedback do I then get?

Erminia Ibarra calls that a provisional self.

It's kind of like putting on a jacket.

And you get two sources of feedback when you put on a jacket.

The first is you get to wear it and you get to look in the mirror and you get to ask yourself, do I like how I look in this jacket?

Do I like what it says about me?

But you can then also go to a dinner party or you can go to the office and you can see how other people respond to you.

And you can say, do I like how other people see me?

Is this how I want to be seen by other people?

And it's this experimentation that I think people don't do quite enough of, in part because it's really scary, but it's a really helpful source of information that can tell us a lot about ourselves, both about who we are and what we care about, but perhaps also about how we want to pursue that that we're passionate about.

I felt that question.

Thank you, Richard, for sharing that.

I think that on its surface, I can hear a lot of fear in that question.

What happens if one thing that I deeply care about

is no longer there for me and I don't know what comes next or I don't think that there is something that comes next.

That is really scary because in part it means that we don't necessarily know who we are anymore.

In many ways, it reminds me of the football player Andrew Luck who had to give up on football because of an injury and then was forced to confront himself with the question, if I'm not a quarterback, then who am I?

Sally Maitlis similarly has focused on dancers who had a career-ending injury and those are the very same thoughts that they ask themselves if I'm not a dancer then who am I?

So I think recognizing that when a person goes through something like that it is normal and perhaps it should be expected that that's a very painful time period and that perhaps there is no easy answer or easy solution